In Darkness
by bethos
Summary: Rimmer & Lister, following events of the series - same old story, new chapters, same author, new pen-name.
1. It Starts

In Darkness  
  
Disclaimer: A statement made to save one's own ass.  
  
I don't own any of these characters, probably not the concepts (whoever did anything that hasn't been done before? although I looked around a bit to see if I could find this story for a long while before I wrote it) and although it would be amusing to have them running around my dormroom it's probably just as well they don't exist. I own nothing, so suing me would be pointless, and I hope not to offend anybody although if you're going to be offended by guy-on-guy stuff, what on Earth are you reading slash for, I'd like to know?  
  
Also, I've never done this before, which I feel ought to be fair warning: never written fanfic, never written slash. I've always thought I'd be terrible at it. But you know, well ... why not? The worst thing that'll happen is that what I write will be incurably bad and no one will like it.   
  
There is no conceivably way in which I could profit from writing this story. None at all. Really.  
  
---  
  
That was the originally disclaimer and whatnot that I had on here. I've taken the story down from my old name and put it up here now *and* I've written another chapter ... groveling apologies for the long, long, insanely long wait will be included with the new chapter. ;-)  
  
____  
  
It Starts.  
  
____  
  
Rimmer glared at the underside of Lister's bunk. He might have toned down the expression if he realized how much it made him look like a vulture with a hangover ... but then again, it mirrored fairly well how he felt, so he might not have. He might have been pleased, in a perverse sort of way.   
  
It wasn't fair. Rimmer had long ago come to the conclusion that life was not only unfair, it was particularly slanted against him, and there was nothing at all to be done about it; but that didn't stop him sulking. The mood was rotten and it was, of course, all Lister's fault. It usually was, these days ... although sometimes it could be the Cat, or Kryten, or Holly, or just the general cruelty of the universe. It was just that, on average, it was the infuriating goimp currently existing in peaceful somnolence several feet above his head.   
  
It was all that business with the psymoon, too. Actually, that was most of it. It was, of course, only natural that when given physical form he would be threatened with physical torture. There was no way that he could exist in a solid way in a situation where something nice was going to happen. Then again, Rimmer couldn't remember the last time something nice had happened to him anyway, not even when he was alive. Not really, anyway. Well, there was ... this and that. Nothing worth mentioning. Nothing that hadn't been completely, totally and unfairly outweighed by everything nasty that the universe had done to him over the years.  
  
The memories of sensation kept creeping back into his mind -- memories that he would have done better just to forget, just to dismiss into the usual background noise of universal suffering. The feel of a warm, living hand ... resting on his thigh ...  
  
Rimmer rolled over. It didn't do much good. The main problem with being a hologram was that you couldn't toss and turn properly.  
  
No, Rimmer corrected himself after a moment, shooting a steel-edged glare at the bunk above him, not the main problem. Definitely not the main problem. Not even remotely *close* to the main problem ...   
  
Arms embracing him, that was another one. Even the Cat had, in the end, joined in -- and Rimmer grimaced as he thought of the Cat's smooth dress, wiry arms, painstakingly well-groomed smell, all self-centeredness, sarcasm and vanity, joining in on the cruel trick they'd played on him just to save their own smegging hides.   
  
Rimmer was all for looking out for number one, but not at his own expense.  
  
And Kryten. That ridiculous mechanoid. That bizarre android with his mechanized holier-than-thou attitude, a device designed to keep the toilets clean, one with even less understanding of the social graces than Rimmer himself, trying to make him feel wanted, accepted, loved. A group hug situation, thought Rimmer. Good grief.  
  
Rimmer rolled over again, scowling.  
  
The words still rang in his ears. Words that had, of course, turned out to be a bloody lie. He couldn't understand why he was dwelling on them so much; after all, it was only Lister. Stupid, pathetic, unambitious, insufferable, rude, crude, smelly Lister ... the only man ever to get his money back from the odor-eater people.  
  
"I love you, man," Rimmer heard in his head. "I really, really love you." 


	2. It Continues

Smeg, thought Rimmer darkly. All lies, naturally. He shouldn't have believed it even for a moment. The universe took a special delight in being horrible to him, after all. In reminding him that he was so fundamentally unlovable. His parents certainly hadn't loved him, nor his brothers. He'd never had any real friends. So why had he believed them? Believed him, in spite of all evidence to the contrary?  
  
Their number was up, they'd said. It was time to set the record straight. Smegging hell, set the record straight.   
  
It was one of the nastier things that had ever been done to him, Rimmer decided. Giving him hope and then tearing it away from him again ... hope that someone, somewhere might recognize that in him, buried down deep, was a worthwhile person buried under all the smeg waiting to get out. Rimmer didn't believe it himself. Not really. Not actually. Not after all this time.   
  
But they'd given him hope.  
  
Lister had given him hope ...   
  
And they'd taken it away.  
  
Lister had taken it away.  
  
The memory of sensation was creeping back again: this time, arms embracing him ... Lister's arms. The feel of him, pressed against Rimmer's side ... the irrepressible grin as he spoke words that, as it turned out, he hadn't meant, but words that had felt real, felt good. The words had felt as real and as good as the embrace ... somehow more important than the Cat's touch, or Kryten's. Lister's words, Lister's touch, they had all been so real, so ... human.  
  
Rimmer scowled at Lister's bunk. All lies. Of course Lister didn't care about him. Didn't love him. Nobody did. Nobody would. Smeg, nobody even could, as far as he could tell.   
  
"I love you, Arnie," Rimmer heard in his head. "This's a beautiful man, big man. You're a big man ..."  
  
Smegging hell.  
  
"Lister?" he said.  
  
There was silence from the top bunk.  
  
"Lister," he said again. Then, "Listy? Are you awake?"  
  
Lister's voice came from above, grumpily. "What do you want, Rimmer?"  
  
Rimmer blinked, momentarily at a loss. What did he want? Well, he wasn't sure, exactly. He wanted the reality again. He wanted to feel Lister's arms again. He wanted to hear the words again. He wanted the insufferable, irritating, infuriating grin back, in a different world when it wouldn't be insufferable or irritating or infuriating at all. He wanted ... he wanted ...  
  
... Lister?  
  
Of course not. Ridiculous.  
  
"You're a manky git," he said.   
  
To feel his arms, to hear his words ... to taste his lips, his tongue, his ...  
  
*Lister*? Good grief, thought Rimmer, have I gone completely mad?  
  
"Oh," said Lister. "Is that all, then?"  
  
Rimmer wanted to scream at him. He wanted to shout all sorts of nasty things, all of them too close to the truth that he didn't even want to admit: all sorts of things about what had gone on earlier that day, the wretched business with the psymoon, the cruelty of what they'd done to him to get out of it.  
  
He wanted to feel him, in a real body, in a real way. In ways that he couldn't even put names to, he wanted Lister.   
  
Smeg.  
  
"Yes," he said.  
  
"All right," said Lister. Was there amusement there? "You're a smeghead, Rimmer. A complete and total smeghead."  
  
"In an affectionate way!" Rimmer called back, monkeying Lister's accent. "In a kiddin' around, jokin', friendly, affectionate way!"  
  
"Oh," Lister said. He at least had the grace to sound a little guilty. "Look, I'm sorry, man, but either we lied to you or we were all dead in yer psyche."  
  
"Git," Rimmer said. He rolled over again.  
  
Lister didn't answer, although Rimmer fancied he might have heard a sigh.  
  
Rimmer glared out into the darkness. Stupid psyche, he thought. Stupid smegging psyche. 


	3. In the Light of Day

Rimmer bounded out of bed with his customary alacrity and did a few jumping jacks just to prove he could. It was a habit he'd started to get out of recently, and then again it didn't make much sense; Lister was obviously dead to the world. Rimmer peered up at him. The blankets were mangled and one leg was splayed out from under them at a somewhat awkward angle that the scouser was certain to complain about when he finally woke up. His thumb was jammed in his mouth. Huh. He'd probably had a couple. Whenever Lister fell asleep drunk he tended to revert to childhood, not that he had very far back to go, the big baby.  
  
Rimmer blinked. Watching Lister suck his thumb in his sleep was hardly high on his list of "things to accomplish," and there was work to be done, somewhere. He glanced in the mirror, feeling harried. Last night had been hellish, certainly. David Lister, the pathetic useless blob of lazy slobby scum, hadn't exactly been of much help. Not that that was a surprise; people didn't help Rimmer, unless it was to help him find the door by delivering a healthy kick to the seat of his trousers.  
  
"Oof," said Lister, blinking his eyes open. At least, it sounded like an 'oof,' although nothing large and heavy seemed to have connected with the scouser's stomach to cause such a sound, more was the pity.  
  
He peered blearily down from the top bunk at Rimmer, as though his eyes weren't focusing properly. "What are you doing up?" he said.  
  
"Early to bed and early to rise, Listy," said Rimmer, with as much false brightness as he could force out.   
  
Lister blinked as though this was a saying utterly foreign to his experience. "You what?" he said.   
  
"Enjoying the taste of your thumb?" Rimmer asked. "I wouldn't want *that* in my mouth, certainly, who knows where it's been?"  
  
Lister looked at it as though it, too, was something foreign to his experience, and didn't reply immediately.  
  
"My," Rimmer said, smirking, "aren't we talky this morning?"  
  
"I just don't have anything to say," Lister said, with something akin to mildness that made Rimmer blink.  
  
Reticent? Lister? Good grief, he probably couldn't even *spell* it.   
  
"I was thinking, you know," Lister continued after a pause, glancing at his somewhat sodden thumb, "about what we said yesterday."  
  
Rimmer stared at him, for once speechless.  
  
"You know," Lister said, apparently addressing his thumb, "when we were escaping from the psymoon and all that."  
  
Rimmer continued not to reply.  
  
"You know," Lister said, awkwardly, "what with ... everything we said."  
  
Rimmer's response was a further absence of dialogue.  
  
"And I thought," said Lister, still gazing intently at his soggy digit, "that I owe you an apology. That we all do. You know. And all that."  
  
Rimmer felt that some sort of an answer to this was in order. As far as he was concerned, real apologies were things that happened to other people. Lister was *attempting* to be a decent human being and do the right thing.   
  
All he managed to say, though, was "Oh."  
  
"And, well," Lister said, scratching at the side of his pudgy, boyish face with his still-damp thumbnail, "you may be a total smeghead with your head so far up your arse you can watch your own esophagus work some of the time and all that, but you've still got feelings. I'm sure. Somewhere. If there was a way we could've got out of that without doing that to you you know we would have done it. We got no pleasure out of deceiving you that way at all. It was a smegging heartless thing to do to you, Rimmer. I'm sorry, okay?"  
  
"This is an apology, is it?" Rimmer said.  
  
"Well, yeah," Lister said, uncomfortably.   
  
"I won't let it go to my head," Rimmer answered briskly. "Clean uniform, please!"  
  
Once dressed, shaved and washed - not necessarily in that order - Second Technician Arnold J. Rimmer (deceased) strolled out of the living quarters utterly determined to forget the entire episode of the previous day, not to mention some of the thoughts that had rattled around in his head during the night. They'd just been alone in space too long, he told himself. That explained everything. Insane sexual frustration being thrown into sharp relief by a sudden physical manifestation and the overwhelming sensation of a warm hand touching his inner thigh leading to thoughts of an indelicate nature that would certainly never have happened if he had been in his right mind. That was all. That was everything. Everything!  
  
And Lister's uncharacteristic attempts at being considerate, well, the slobbiest slob in the universe was probably feeling a little guilty. The little bugger had always had an idealistic streak, after all. Not that his heartfelt apology had been particularly considerate, or for that matter, particularly laced with idealism, or even, really, all that terribly apologetic.  
  
Anyway, Rimmer was dead. He was composed entirely of light. It sort of made sexual encounters a moot point. Even if he /were/ to admit some kind of ... bizarre ... insane ... ridiculous ... absurd ... desire for Lister, it wouldn't accomplish anything at all and would only fill him with self-doubt, trepidation, absolute loathing and disgust. So. Stiff upper lip, and he'd think about Yvonne MacGruder. Yes. That would make things better. 


	4. How Far is Low?

A/N: Holy *crap* it's been a long time since I updated ... so long that I'm no longer writing fic under the same name! But I decided I wanted to continue this sucker, so if you're picking it up again after all this time - wow! Thank you! I really appreciate your patience and understanding of the stupid that is my life.  
  
In Darkness: Redux  
  
Lister found his brain tortured by mental images and the memory of sounds that he hoped he'd never hear again. He rolled over in bed, trying to banish the thoughts from his head. That he'd had a scare today was certain … that he'd gone through things that no living person should be forced to reckon with, that much was sure. But the places of today that his brain had decided to dwell in were growing increasingly more disturbing by inches.  
  
He rolled over again and punched his pillow a few times, trying to force it into a more comfortable shape, as though physical discomfort were what was keeping him awake rather than the images which had apparently been etched into the backs of his eye-lids.  
  
HAD that come out of Rimmer's sick, twisted brain? Really? Was that what lurked in the dark side of the man that regularly slept in the bunk beneath him?   
  
Lister thought of his own dark side and found himself suddenly very glad that the others hadn't had to interact with it all that much. The blackened teeth, the deranged giggling, the rapacious expression …   
  
If Rimmer knew that his dark side had interacted with him the way it had, he'd probably be horribly embarrassed.  
  
He thought of his dark half, and he thought of Rimmer's dark half – because he'd found it impossible to stop thinking about Rimmer's dark half for very long in the past hour or so as he'd tried to find sleep – and he couldn't help but wonder whether or not they, well, got on.  
  
"I'm going to lash you to within an inch of your life," he heard Rimmer's voice breathing lustfully in his head, "and then … I'm going to have you."  
  
He felt a shiver run up and down his spine. The holo-whip. God. And the fishnets. Fishnets? And the leather … what was that? A corset? A leotard? Whatever it was, it was leather. Uh. Tight leather. It looked like something out of Rocky Horror Picture Show …  
  
.. which was an image his brain did not need to supply. Great. Rimmer as Tim Curry? What was next? Rimmer as Madonna?  
  
… oh God. Stupid imagination.   
  
Was Rimmer gay? The thought had never occurred to him before this incident, but then, he didn't know much about gay men, excepting Bent Bob of course.   
  
"Rimmer?" he said.  
  
No answer. It was probably just as well. How in the world would that conversation go? 'So, Rimmsy, erm … have you ever, y'know, wanted to sleep with another man?'  
  
Was there *any* way he could ask this question without it sounding like a come-on?  
  
'Are you, in fact, gay?'  
  
What kind of question was that?  
  
Was Rimmer a *dom*? That seemed to Lister the more important question. His own dark side's representation had been disturbingly accurate, with the meaningless sex and the violence … although maybe not the sadistic insane giggling, but maybe …   
  
'Have you ever wanted to pour hot wax on me at all? Er … possibly fantasized about chaining me to the bed and lashing me in a, y'know, erotic way?'   
  
Maybe that was what had been up with that time he'd tied Lister to the bed with his hair … although that didn't explain the fire-alarm.   
  
No. That was ridiculous. And anyway, it didn't matter … Rimmer was a hologram, in that he wasn't solid in any way, and so there was little risk of getting sexually assaulted by him at any point in the foreseeable future.  
  
And Rimmer probably wasn't gay, either. He certainly seemed to like women a great deal, in a very physically-oriented way that had little to do with emotional fulfillment as far as Lister could tell. Rimmer wasn't socially capable enough to understand about interacting with women on a level that progressed beyond the shallow.  
  
But maybe he was bisexual?  
  
That was worthy of more consideration. But bisexuality as far as Lister understood it was all about being open to new possibilities, to changes and to new ways of expressing the age-old human desire to fuck things 'til fucking them was simply no longer an option for you.   
  
Lister considered himself a modern, enlightened man for his time and he was perfectly okay with his roommate being a dead bisexual, but it was the sort of thing he would have liked to know beforehand … he thought of everything that they had shared together and wondered if Rimmer didn't think of it as some kind of prolonged courtship ritual.  
  
"Rimmer?" he said again. "Rimmer, are you awake?"  
  
"What do you want, Lister?" Rimmer mumbled into his pillow.  
  
He was half-asleep. Lister could probably get away with asking any sort of question now and conceivably get a semi-coherent answer. But then again, the sort of question Lister had in mind to ask was probably the sort of question that would bring Rimmer to full alertness in a hurry.  
  
"Uh …" he said. "D'you remember today, with the better halfs and the worsers?"  
  
Rimmer sighed audibly beneath him. "Lister, this is not the sort of thing I will be able to forget in a hurry."  
  
"Do you think the lows … do you think they were really us? You know, the way we really are inside of ourselves when you take away all of the, you knows, uppers?" Lister said.  
  
"I don't know, probably. I can't think of another explanation," Rimmer said.  
  
Lister stared at the ceiling. He couldn't help but agree but it made him nervous. He thought about his representation on the "low" ship. The part of him that wanted all his friends to fail … the part of him that lusted after meaningless sex … was his low any better or worse than Rimmer's?   
  
"Uh … Lister?" Rimmer said, sounding much more awake. "Why are we talking about this?"  
  
Lister didn't answer at first. 'I was wondering if you were actually gay' seemed to lack finesse somehow. "Dunno," he said. It lacked a certain something but it didn't require being honest with his friend.  
  
Friend?  
  
Lister couldn't think of another word for Rimmer. He did feel sorry for him, he really did. There wasn't much else that you could feel for Rimmer, other than annoyance or disgust. He dug himself into such mental and emotional holes … and Lister really had done some horrible things to him over the years. Friendship might have been a strong word, but then again, it might not have been … he certainly knew Rimmer better than he had known anyone in his entire life, possibly even better than he knew himself.  
  
"Can I go back to sleep now," Rimmer asked, "or are we going to continue to be philosophical for no known reason?"  
  
"I was just wondering if those guys really were in us," Lister said.  
  
"Somewhere. They had to come from somewhere," Rimmer said.   
  
"I would never do that to anybody," he said.  
  
Rimmer made an exasperated noise. "Lister!" he said.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Did you see the highs?" Rimmer said. "If that was in us, think of how deep the triplicator would have had to dig to shovel it out. Did you hear what the Cat's said to him?"  
  
Lister felt suddenly reassured. If the demons were buried that deep, what sort of bearing could they have on their actual lives? "You're right. It was stupid," he said.  
  
"What brought this on?" Rimmer said, sounding confused.  
  
"Nothing," Lister said. "It's just that yours seemed quite *gay*."   
  
"Oh," Rimmer said.  
  
"You made advances," Lister said.  
  
"I did?" His voice seemed to have gone flat.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"It was a little off-putting. You were a bit of a dominatrix."  
  
"Can men do that?"  
  
"You managed it."  
  
"Oh."  
  
Silence fell. Lister rolled over in bed again and closed his eyes. The weight was off his chest, and now it sounded like Rimmer was going to worry about it instead. Heh. Served him right, him and his stupid psyche.  
  
His stupid *gay* psyche. 


End file.
